A boy befriends an innocent alien, who resembles a gigantic robot. A paranoid governmental agent, however, desires to obliterate the alien. Brad Bird’s non-digital animation of the 1968 children’s story has an irresistible simplicity and charm. Perhaps because it has a certain subversive tone, this was overlooked in America; it deserves a bigger audience overseas, where its message as much as its charm will most likely be better received. After deliberately disobeying his mother, young Hogarth Hughes wanders into the woods in search of aliens, stumbles across the Iron Giant and rescues it from an electrifying fate.